Customer Reviews
Great to Dip - By: The Engager, 15 Feb 2008 
Not the most engaging of page-turning reads & more of a "dipper"! Keep itin your briefcase for those 20 minute journeys for insights from some great leaders & find yourself striving to weave patterns from the threads of best practice (as you should........).
Great self awareness - By: William Chambers, 10 Jan 2008 
Certainly a book that goes against the grain of what many people are told to do. First, Break All The Rules is a must read for those who want to take advantage of their natural strengths & talents rather than focus on the weaknesses that we all have. A must read to take the next stepin personal improvement.
Bill Chambers
Focus on your strengths - By: L. Duran-Camfferman, 10 May 2006 I strongly believein focusing on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Any time you spend on improving your weaknesses is wasted, because you're not spending time doing what you do best, & you can get your weakness to improve from a 5 to a 7, but it won't become a 9 ever.
Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman focus on the same. As a manager you should focus people on their strengths to get the most out of them. It means changing the way you hire them, the way you train them, the way you reward them & the way you team them up.
For me & many of my participants (I'm a management trainer), this book is a great relief. No more competence management, which tells you which gaps you still need to close to become all-round perfect. An exhausting message to hear, by the way, because you will NEVER get a natural eye for detail or be a great out of the box thinker... unless that was your given talent.
The art, so say the writers, is to create a safety net for a person's weakness, so it stops being a problem. Such as teaming them up with someone who has complementary skills, or rearranging their task to never get them to comein touch with their weakness. A leader,in short, must do anything possible to allow his or her people to focus fully on their strengths.
I find this book hugely inspirational, not just for leaders, but also for employees. It relieves you from the pressure of having to be all-round perfect. It makes a powerful step towards personal branding.
Interesting way of linking good management to company performance - By: C. Hagh, 20 Apr 2006 Given how many business management books there are, it is refreshing to see a research-based attempt to link specific aspects of management theory to company performance.
As a manager, I found this book to be helpfulin backing up some things that made intuitive sense &in challenging some basic assumptions I had. It's a very positive way of thinking about how you bring out the strengths of the individuals on a team.
No book has the answers. This one has some thought-provoking findings that I've used to improve the way I manage.
A classic case of oppinionated tripe - By: , 10 Mar 2005 
The entire Gallup 'strengths-finder' philosophy is, by any definition no more than "theory". There seem to be no meaningful psychological studies available to back these ideas up. The data are exrapolated from laughably flawed research criteria & without use of universally recognised experimental requirements. Flyingin the face of established experimental design & accepted stipulations for accuracy, the results are proffered as absolute. Scandalous. This book is is quite simply outrageous, unprofessional &in some respects even dangerous. The title of the book sums up its own contents rather nicely - 'First Break All The Rules'. So beautifully stated, of course & so completely accurate! The Gallup Organisation seems to be yet another tedious pop psychology outfit, setting itself up with all the credibility & authority to infiltrate society & tinker around with human thinking & thus gifting itself with dominance on the subject. Speaking as a psychologist, I don't agree with them! A strangely arrogant, superficial & slightly disturbing read.
